in case you miss the news I have created a new forum category Monetization and the TLA integration is ready to be tested.

I hope this will work fine ;-)

michal

Keep up the great work, Michal.

:::KBS

This makes clear - there is something happening for a long term plan.

This gives me some more (and better) arguments….

Thanks and good luck for Your plans!

Kind regards
Helmut

I fully realize that the current situation might look a bit uncomfortable for users. I also have very bad experience with projects that are "for community", "for free" and "done in spare time" and suddenly just shut down because a guy said I do not have any more time to run this. However I have not started Wikidot as a spare-time project nor in order to learn how to program websites. There always was a plan behind it. And — which I am very proud of — this plan is still fine.

Indeed we are currently converting the "one-man-effort" into a "real company", with real investors, professional servers behind and a team of people behind the product. We have also looked at a bunch of successful open-source and commercial projects (like Zimbra, Wordpress, Zoho etc.) and have a very clear way of becoming a successful company. The stage Wikidot has been in the last months you could consider as spin-up.

There are several ways a product like Wikidot can get money from and you really should not worry about it. One of them I have just unveiled: partnerships with advertising companies. It has been also discussed some time ago here on forums. There are other ways too which I would rather not tell now, but this could include pro-level hosting of wiki farms (quite an obvious move) and services around the software itself that is going to be released. Alternative way for web projects is always: grow, grow, find investors, grow grow, find investors, grow, sell the project to a bigger player. There are several projects that followed this path (like reddit.com or kiko). In either case users of Wikidot should not loose.

I really understand any doubts but I deeply believe Wikidot is and will be a reliable platform. There are of course things that needs to be fixed or changed but so far we are doing very very well sticking to the plan.

michal

I got a question from my collegs in my little company:
- how does this wikidot over-live without earnings any money in a long time view?
- how can we be sure that collaborate work will be possible in the future ?
- means how can we be sure that this wikifarm is not closed at any one unexpected moment
in the future - without backups perhaps. ( I know, this can happen in all other wikis too..)
- as a company we would pay a little fee for the usage of the place
- it seems to be easier to build here a handbook for our software -products as in our standardprovider,
written by a lot of writers.

It looks like a typically labor-result ( from one mens work) beside a "real" Software company,
using some free hard disk space and servers..

Michael, if this view is incorrect than please let us now how
-we (the users in the future) can be on a secure side ( as far as it could be possible)?

Hope this is not a too disturbing question at the moment!

Kind regards
Helmut

One thing I can tell is that we will NEVER EVER force ads on ANY wiki. So if you want to have a wiki (still free, no limited functionality) without any ads - no problem.
On the other hand if you have a popular wiki and want to place ads there we are working on ways to let YOU monetize your wiki (which means you would get much more than with 50/50 revenue split). I hope that this will be available as soon as May/June.

This is great news :) Thank you for your continuous efforts.

On the other hand if you have a popular wiki and want to place ads there we are working on ways to let YOU monetize your wiki (which means you would get much more than with 50/50 revenue split). I hope that this will be available as soon as May/June.

Oh, the hell. I think I can tell you. We are implementing AdSense API functionality so that you could put ads on your wiki easily and painlessly and manage it from within your Wikidot account. There will be also a Text Link Ads affiliate program that will allow you to sell links from on wiki. I am currently testing it on http://snippets.wikidot.com (see links at the bottom?). Honestly it is damn easy to earn a few tens of $$ with them so you might like it too since this kind of pocket-money comes really for free and TLA might perform much better than AdSense for not-so-popular wikis.

OK, back to work!

cheers - michal

Say if your website has already got quite good traffic. Then 10-20 users who doesn't see the adds wouldn't matter that much. So, for instance if you have a team of 3 admins, 5 mods and 7 vip members, you could add these 20 members into the "do-not-display-ads" list.

On the technical side I realize this could mean having to do a database write on each request which could kill you perf wise so another option would be to look at the current time on each request and if the current number of seconds ends in an even number use the users ID. Should still work out to roughly a 50/50 split.

Some of us wouldn't mind paying assuming we would then be free to monitize our sites ourself. I'm sure that the issue for you there is just managing the billing right?

@pieter: I do not agree that running ads on low-traffic sites make little sense. Indeed most of the traffic comes from small wikis… I will have to think more about earning credits for running ads…
But a good point: owners of high-traffic sites should have some extra options. I was thinking about letting them run their own ads.

There is also another way I have been considering to help people monetize their sites. OK, I know monetizing is NOT what should be most important, but look at http://www.text-link-ads.com — this is a nice way to make a revenue and can be incorporated easily. Simply saying: let users sell links from within their sites. For popular sites one could easily make >$100 per month.

The long-term strategy would be rather find a way to let user run their own ads but have some percentage of the revenue. How could this be done?

@testi: imho the right side would destroy layout for most of the sites… my suggestions are: (look at https://www.google.com/adsense/adformats for reference)

1. 468 x 60 banner below the main page content, but above the "page options"
2. 728 x 90 below "page options" and below the side column but above the "This site…" footer. centered
3. 200 x 200 banner below the main page content, but above the "page options"? with image ads + video? rather not.

Options 1. and 2. could be rotated or selected based on page length. Also look at the "heat map": https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=17954. From my experience I can tell that this reflects the real world quite well. The right side is NOT a good choice imho.

There would be no ads for very short pages or pages with number of revisions <3 (I guess).

I think most people can live with placing ads—if it is done in a sensible way. As mentioned, please no blinking stuff, no annoying flash, pop-ups, etc.

My experience is that most users are happy with text ads. They are both unobtrusive and useful, because they are not “screaming” and relate to the content of the website. A good position for an ad would be on the right: it’s close to the vertical scrollbar, so many users will probably have a look at it and with this position it is not mixed with the actual content of a website. A good example is http://www.openserving.com/wiki/Forum:Index

Regards,
Testi

I'd recommend that ads are voluntary. On low-volume sites they don't have any point; on high-volume sites the owners will want to enable ads so they can earn credits.

There are a number of extra things that I'd be happy to use credits for:

1. Switch off the 'powered by' banner (esp. for commercial sites)
2. Nightly backup of my sites to some remote ftp server
3. Email lists for my site

For sure there will be a system of credits similar to one at http://wordpress.com. So that:

• you can buy credits, e.g. 1$ = 1 credit
• exchange credits for extra features (e.g. remove ads, extra storage etc.)

I think it would be best just to give credits to contributors. But indeed this would need some rules…

If so, wouldn't be possible to get rid of ads by work to project? I mean especially this:

• work on enhancing opensource release
• making quality templates
• helping others in forum
• propagation of Wikidot in media - computer magazines, radios, TV's :-)
• translating of Wikidot

Of course it assumes making measurable rules and controlling mechanisms.

Is such approach acceptable for you, Michal? I hope, that it would still be enough money from people who rather pay, than spend time.

There will a number of ways to get rid of ads. This is still not final, but I can tell you that you will be able do disable ads if:

• non-profit (registered) organization
• wiki as a homepage of an open-source (with an OSI-approved licence) project
• wiki used in education
• individual arrangements
• pay 5$/month in other cases (unless you have A LOT of traffic)

I realize putting ads on user-created pages is a delicate thing and have to be done carefully. I would rather wait and consult the community than do something that would hurt it. But this has been mentioned in the Terms of Service from the very beginning.

But on the other hand — I would like to emphasize it — many users would feel much more comfortable using the service that is profitable and grows nicely than using a one that has uncertain future.

However if anyone finds a nice alternative to displaying ads — I am all for it.

But Wikidot will be still great even with banner! Hope it will be the small and unobtrusive one. No blinking please.

Milhaus

indeed AdSense is one of the most appealing options. And as far as I know the only truly international. I hope a mall banner at the bottom will do for now. We will see in a coupe of months!

michal

I prefer Google AdSense, not because I like this company, but it is probably only such multi language system. Among other languages, from this week we can use it also for Czech sites. I prefer if visitors of my Czech site will see ads in Czech. Then it can be hopefully sometimes even useful for them…